Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 205594 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1028(@200wpm)___ 822(@250wpm)___ 685(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 205594 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1028(@200wpm)___ 822(@250wpm)___ 685(@300wpm)
I spend most of the morning digging around in empty rooms, trying very hard to ignore all the destruction. I pointedly look away from tears in the tapestries, from dark stains on the rugs. I don’t find anything my sister would want, I think. Whatever treasures Lios had have been taken by the conquerors, and all that are left are scraps and memories. I head down to the library instead, determined to tuck away a few books for Nemeth. After all, if we’re going to be taking a boat, we can surely take a trunk full of books. I’m sure he’ll fight me on this, but I’m good at winning fights. I pick a few of the rarer-seeming books, the ones at the top of his pile that he can’t resist pawing every now and then. We don’t have the luxury of staying here long enough so he can read them all, and I’m desperately glad for that.
It feels as if I’m roosting in the graveyard of my people, and that if I remain here long enough, I’m going to be swallowed up by the dead.
Not that there have been a lot of dead. Other than a few scattered bodies, there’s been nothing. I’m relieved, of course, but I’m also confused. There was a battle clearly fought here. Someone would have been killed, and the dead would have had to go somewhere. Nemeth explained to me that the Fellians burn their dead so they can be returned to the skies as ash and smoke, but that doesn’t explain where the Liosian dead are.
Maybe they’ve all been taken captive and are currently at Darkfell. Maybe I’ll see a sea of familiar faces when we get there.
Maybe.
I stack the books I want Nemeth to have into an unwieldy pile, and then grimace at the mud I’ve tracked in. My shoes don’t protect my feet inasmuch as they simply seem to gather mud, and I’ve trailed a lot of it into the library. If it gets on the books, Nemeth will fuss, and while I find his fussing adorable, it does make sense to protect the books somehow. I think of a trunk my sister had in her quarters that was yet untouched. The lid’s jewels were pried off but it seemed otherwise intact, and the perfect size to hold a variety of tomes for my Nemeth.
I head upstairs for my sister’s quarters, and as I do, the sun comes out from behind the clouds and shines in through one of the broken windows. It’s such a rare occurrence that I pause in front of the windows, sighing with pleasure at the sunbeams…
…and that’s when I see them.
The graves.
There’s not many of them, but it’s the size of each one that makes me clench the windowsill. Shards of glass embed themselves into my hands, but I don’t pull away. I can’t, because I have to take in the sight below.
The palace had gardens once. I never cared for them much, because my medicine made me sensitive to heat and it always felt too warm to spend much time outside, but I remember my sister loved Lios’s gardens. She loved the flowers that filled the beds, the vines that crept along the walls and the scents of the herbs that flooded Nurse’s herb gardens. I remember there was a maze, and a sundial, and a statue of the goddess herself, holding the moon above one shoulder like she was carrying a pot of water.
The statue of the goddess remains, but everything else is gone. The maze is gone. The hedges gone. The herb garden, gone. What remains are five sunken pits in the muck, each one headed with the eye symbol of the Absent One, hastily carved out of wood. Each sunken pit is nightmarishly big, bigger than my sister’s entire suite of rooms, and I wonder just how many people were buried in each large grave.
Each one is far, far too big for just one body. Or even ten bodies.
This is what has happened to Lios. Tears prick my eyes and I lean over the broken window, as if pushing my face out into the light will somehow enable me to see more. I stare with sick horror at the mass graves, praying that my sister and her children aren’t in any of them. That both Nurse and Riza are safe. That those I love somehow made it away from this place.
I want to leave. I need to leave.
Now.
Something flutters in the breeze. There’s a heap of rags at the feet of the goddess, with a pair of swords sticking upright, the ends shoved through the rags and into the ground below. I wonder why these particular rags…and then I see a leg bone. And the tiny bones that make up a hand, shattered and scattered in the mud. It takes me a moment longer to see the skull, and for me to realize one of the swords pierces it through the eye.